Forest Fire Management Victoria Wimmera district manager Glenn Rudolph said the months after the fire involved rehabilitation and recovery work across both public land and private property.

“Hundreds of kilometers of burnt fences had to be cleared and rebuilt, water used in the firefight had to be replaced, public roads had to be assessed for dangerous trees and treated before reopening for public access, and much livestock was burnt that had to be assessed and dealt with,” he said.

“A significant number of buildings and dwellings had been burnt, requiring follow-up with insurance companies, and the challenges of rebuilding or moving. 

“The mental impacts of events like these are long-term and no doubt still being felt today.”

SPECIAL FEATURE: Northern Grampians Complex fire, five years on

Mr Rudolph said the fire’s impact on the environment was difficult to measure.

“We know the Australian bush, particularly in this part of the world, is quite well adapted to fire,” he said.

“Fire is a natural part of the landscape, and humans have been propagating fires for many reasons for thousands of years.

“It’s a complex situation.

“Seasonal rainfall also has a major impact on how the bush recovers. In continual drought conditions species recover slower and are probably more vulnerable to repeated fire events or other threats such as predation by foxes, or disease.”

Mr Rudolph said there had been a lot of work done since 2006 to determine how certain species responded to fire in the Grampians.

“For example a long-term mammal monitoring program was set up by Parks Victoria, which has shown some interesting trends including the importance of seasonal rainfall, but also the value of protecting certain areas from fire such as damp gullies that some species use as refuge in drought years,” he said.

“After the Mt Lubra fire some very rare plant species were found to regenerate in large numbers, suggesting that those species do require fire at some interval in their life cycle. 

“Very simply though there's a strong consensus that large intense bushfires are not beneficial and not the type of fire that the landscape requires, especially in such short time frames.”

Mr Rudolph said the Northern Grampians Complex fire was the third large landscape-scale fire the Grampians had experienced in eight years.

It followed the Mt Lubra fire in 2006, the largest fire on record in the Grampians, which burnt more than 120,000 hectares. The Victoria Valley fire in 2013 burnt 35,000 hectares.

“Nearly 87 per cent of the park had been burnt in less than 10 years, often in extremely intense fires,” Mr Rudolph said.

“About 10,000 hectares of the Northern Grampians Complex fire area had been burnt in the 2006 Mt Lubra fire, a stark reminder of how quickly the Australian bush can carry fire again after even intense bushfires.

“These are unprecedented fires since European history began, in terms of their scale and time scale between.

“Prior to the last decade, on average the Grampians experienced a large fire in the order of 10 to 20,000 hectares once every 30 or so years.

“To have three in such short succession is telling us something about the state of the environment. The millennium drought was a significant event that affected the whole landscape including agriculture, water storages and bushfire impacts.

“These events are predicted to happen more often and we need to be prepared for them.”

Mr Rudolph said the Wimmera had experienced several other large fires on both public land and private property since the mid 2000s.

He said the implications of this for bushfire management extended to planned burning; consideration for how and where houses were built; landowner preparedness for fires; and partnerships between private land owners and public land authorities to reduce fuels around towns and communities.

“No one organisation or person owns all the risk – working together is a key solution to this,” he said.